Top 100 Andre Breton Quotes
#1. May night continue to fall upon the orchestra
Andre Breton
#2. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express
verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner
the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Andre Breton
#3. Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory.
Andre Breton
#4. Again begins the ridiculous, terrible waiting, in which we do not know which object to move, which gesture to repeat - what to do in order to make what we are waiting for happen.
Andre Breton
#5. The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
Andre Breton
#6. Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
Andre Breton
#7. There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine. To feel the need to vary the object of this temptation, to replace it by others - this bears witness that one is about to be found unworthy, that one has already doubtless proved unworthy of innocence ...
Andre Breton
#8. In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.
Andre Breton
#9. If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.
Andre Breton
#10. The truth can only be seen when you close your eyes to reason and surrender yourself to dreams.
Andre Breton
#11. They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish.
Andre Breton
#12. Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.
Andre Breton
#13. The imaginary is that which tends to become real.
Andre Breton
#14. If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Andre Breton
#15. I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.
Andre Breton
#16. Intellectually, true beauty is very difficult to distinguish a priori from the bloom of youth.
Andre Breton
#17. No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
Andre Breton
#18. One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.
Andre Breton
#19. The act of love and the act of poetry
Are not compatible
With the reading aloud of a newspaper
Andre Breton
#21. The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.
Andre Breton
#22. Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.
Andre Breton
#23. A word and everything is saved.
A word and all is lost.
Andre Breton
#24. I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.
Andre Breton
#25. The eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror ... if it has only the capacity to reflect.
Andre Breton
#26. The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise.
Andre Breton
#27. There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
Andre Breton
#28. There is By my leaning over the precipice Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion My finding the secret Of loving you Always for the first time
Andre Breton
#29. All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. andre breton
Andre Breton
#30. It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
Andre Breton
#31. This is the most beautiful night of all, the lightning filled night: day, compared to it, is night.
Andre Breton
#32. The imaginary is what tends to become real.
Andre Breton
#33. I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on ... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight.
Andre Breton
#34. Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?
Andre Breton
#35. No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
Andre Breton
#36. Let us not mince words: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beauitful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful
Andre Breton
#37. The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
Andre Breton
#39. Man proposes and dispose. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy.
Andre Breton
#40. The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.
Andre Breton
#41. How I loathe the servitude people try to hold up to me as being so valuable. I pity the man who is condemned to it, who cannot generally escape it, but it is not the burden of his labor that disposes me in his favor, it is
it can only be
the vigor of his protest against it.
Andre Breton
#42. There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
Andre Breton
#43. Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
Andre Breton
#44. (speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.
Andre Breton
#45. It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and why my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.
Andre Breton
#46. At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.
Andre Breton
#47. It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.
Andre Breton
#48. A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it ...
Andre Breton
#49. Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
Andre Breton
#50. The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows
Andre Breton
#51. Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
Andre Breton
#52. I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read me with eyes wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm of my thought.
Andre Breton
#53. How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.
Andre Breton
#54. The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.
Andre Breton
#55. Past and future monopolize the poet's sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.
Andre Breton
#56. ... I know that if I were mad, after several days of confinement I should take advantage of any lapses in my madness to murder anyone, preferably a doctor, who came near me. At least this would permit me, like the violent, to be confined in solitary. Perhaps they'd leave me alone.
Andre Breton
#57. To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.
Andre Breton
#59. The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros's work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.
Andre Breton
#60. Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.
Andre Breton
#61. When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?
Andre Breton
#62. The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream, the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.
Andre Breton
#63. The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly
Andre Breton
#64. What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.
Andre Breton
#65. What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
Andre Breton
#66. With the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.
Andre Breton
#67. There's only one woman left in the absence of thought that characterizes in pure black this cursed era.
Andre Breton
#68. I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refused to admit defeat, sets off from watever point he chooses, along any other pat save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.
Andre Breton
#69. I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.
Andre Breton
#70. Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.
Andre Breton
#71. I will be like Nijinksi, who was taken last year to the Russian ballet, and could not comprehend what spectacle he was viewing. I will be alone, quite alone in myself, indifferent to all the world's ballets.
Andre Breton
#72. Life's greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
Andre Breton
#73. Tell me whom you haunt and I'll tell you who you are.
Andre Breton
#74. There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
Andre Breton
#75. It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony.
Andre Breton
#76. Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.
Andre Breton
#77. Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
Andre Breton
#78. Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.
Andre Breton
#79. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
Andre Breton
#80. Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
Andre Breton
#81. For me, the single word "God" suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.
Andre Breton
#82. The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.
Andre Breton
#83. This cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things 'are,' while others, which well might be, 'are not.
Andre Breton
#84. It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.
Andre Breton
#85. Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.
Andre Breton
#86. We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.
Andre Breton
#87. The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.
Andre Breton
#88. To poke its umbrella tip in the mud of the electric light
Andre Breton
#89. Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you're settling.
Andre Breton
#90. Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.'
Andre Breton
#91. I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.
Andre Breton
#92. Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
Andre Breton
#93. It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.
Andre Breton
#94. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery
even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness
is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.
Andre Breton
#95. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams ... Man ... is above all the plaything of his memory.
Andre Breton
#96. Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.
Andre Breton
#97. Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.
Andre Breton
#98. I wish I could change my sex as easily as I can change my shirt.
Andre Breton
#99. It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!
Andre Breton
#100. My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.
Andre Breton
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